Non-analyticities in the logarithm of the Loschmidt echo, known as dynamical quantum phase transitions [DQPTs], are a recently introduced attempt to classify the myriad of possible phenomena which can occur in far from equilibrium closed quantum systems. In this work, we analytically investigate the Loschmidt echo in nonequilibrium $s$-wave and topological $p_x+ip_y$ fermionic superfluids. We find that the presence of non-analyticities in the echo is not invariant under global rotations of the superfluid phase. We remedy this deficiency by introducing a more general notion of a grand canonical Loschmidt echo. Overall, our study shows that DQPTs are not a good indicator for the long time dynamics of an interacting system. In particular, there are no DQPTs to tell apart distinct dynamical phases of quenched BCS superconductors. Nevertheless, they can signal a quench induced change in the topology and also keep track of solitons emerging from unstable stationary states of a BCS superconductor.
We investigate the many-body generalization of the orthogonality catastrophe by studying the generalized Loschmidt echo of Luttinger liquids (LLs) after a global change of interaction. It decays exponentially with system size and exhibits universal behaviour: the steady state exponent after quenching back and forth n-times between 2 LLs (bang-bang protocol) is 2n-times bigger than that of the adiabatic overlap, and depends only on the initial and final LL parameters. These are corroborated numerically by matrix-product state based methods of the XXZ Heisenberg model. An experimental setup cons…
We show that non-Hermitian biorthogonal many-body phase transitions can be characterized by the enhanced decay of Loschmidt echo. The quantum criticality is numerically investigated in a non-Hermitian transverse field Ising model by performing the finite-size dynamical scaling of Loschmidt echo. We determine the equilibrium correlation length critical exponents that are consistent with previous results from the exact diagonalization. More importantly, we introduce a simple method to detect quantum phase transitions with the short-time average of rate function motivated by the critically enhanc…
We study the Loschmidt echo in the quenched two-dimensional $p$-wave topological superconductor. We find that if this superconductor is quenched out of the critical point separating its topological and non-topological phases into either of the two gapful phases, its Loschmidt echo features singularities occurring periodically in time where the second derivative of the Loschmidt echo over time diverges logarithmically. Conversely, we give arguments towards $s$-wave superconductors not having singularities in their Loschmidt echo regardless of the quench. We also demonstrate that the conventiona…
We study the spreading of density-density correlations and the Loschmidt echo, after different sudden quenches in an interacting one dimensional Bose gas on a lattice, also in the presence of a superimposed aperiodic potential. We use a time dependent Bogoliubov approach to calculate the evolution of the correlation functions and employ the linked cluster expansion to derive the Loschmidt echo.
Luttinger liquids (LLs) arise by coupling left- and right-moving particles through interactions in one dimension. This most natural partitioning of LLs is investigated by the momentum-space entanglement after a quantum quench using analytical and numerical methods. We show that the momentum-space entanglement spectrum of a LL possesses many universal features both in equilibrium and after a quantum quench. The largest entanglement eigenvalue is identical to the Loschmidt echo, i.e. the overlap of the disentangled and final wavefunctions of the system. The second largest eigenvalue is the overl…
We explore Loschmidt echo in two regimes of one-dimensional (1D) interacting Bose gases: the strongly interacting Tonks-Girardeau (TG) regime, and the weakly-interacting mean-field regime. We find that the Loschmidt echo of a TG gas decays as a Gaussian when small perturbations are added to the Hamiltonian (the exponent is proportional to the number of particles and the magnitude of a small perturbation squared). In the mean-field regime the Loschmidt echo decays faster for larger interparticle interactions (nonlinearity), and it shows richer behavior than the TG Loschmidt echo dynamics, with …
We study the response to sudden local perturbations of highly excited Quantum Ising Spin Chains. The key quantity encoding this response is the overlap between time-dependent wave functions, which we write as a two-times Loschmidt echo. Its asymptotics at long time differences contains crucial information about the structure of the highly excited non-equilibrium environment induced by the quench. We compute the Echo perturbatively for a weak local quench but for arbitrarily large global quench, using a cumulant expansion. Our perturbative results suggest that the Echo decays exponentially, rat…
Identifying dynamical signatures of excited state quantum phase transitions (ESQPTs) in experimentally realizable quantum many-body systems is helpful for understanding the dynamical effects of ESQPTs. In such systems, the highly controllable spinor Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) offer an exceptional platform to study ESQPTs. In this work, we investigate the dynamical characteristics of the ESQPT in spin-$1$ BEC by means of the Loschmidt echo spectrum. The Loschmidt echo spectrum is an extension of the well-known Loschmidt echo and definded as the overlaps between the evolved state and the e…
A quantum Loschmidt echo (also referred to as quantum time mirror) corresponds to an effective time inversion after which the quantum wave function reverses its previous time evolution and eventually reaches its initial distribution again. We propose a comparably simple protocol for such an effective time reversal for ultra-cold atoms in optical lattices which should be easier to realize experimentally than previous proposals.
We study the Loschmidt echo and the dynamical free energy of the Anderson model after a quench of the disorder strength. If the initial state is extended and the eigenstates of the post-quench Hamiltonian are strongly localized, we argue that the Loschmidt echo exhibits zeros periodically with the period $2π/D$ where $D$ is the width of spectra. At these zeros, the dynamical free energy diverges in a logarithmic way. We present numerical evidence of our argument in one- and three-dimensional Anderson models. Our findings connect the dynamical quantum phase transitions to the localization-deloc…
We unveil the role of the long time average of Loschmidt echo in the characterization of nonequilibrium quantum phase transitions by studying sudden quench processes across quantum phase transitions in various quantum systems. While the dynamical quantum phase transitions are characterized by the emergence of a series of zero points at critical times during time evolution, we demonstrate that nonequilibrium quantum phase transitions can be identified by nonanalyticities in the long time average of Loschmidt echo. The nonanalytic behaviours are illustrated by a sharp change in the long time ave…
We propose a versatile Loschmidt echo protocol to detect and quantify multiparticle entanglement. It allows us to extract the quantum Fisher information for arbitrary pure states, and finds direct application in quantum metrology. In particular, the protocol applies to states that are generally difficult to characterize, as non-Gaussian states, and states that are not symmetric under particle exchange. We focus on atomic systems, including trapped ions, polar molecules, and Rydberg atoms, where entanglement is generated dynamically via long-range interaction, and show that the protocol is stab…
We study exact zeros of Loschmidt echo and quantum speed limit time for dynamical quantum phase transition in finite size systems. Our results illustrate that exact zeros of Loschmidt echo exist even in finite size quantum systems when the postquench parameter takes some discrete values in regions with the corresponding equilibrium phase different from the initial phase. As the system size increases and tends to infinity, the discrete parameters distribute continuously in the parameter regions. We further analyze the time for the appearance of the first exact zero of Loschmidt echo which is kn…
The Loschmidt echo, defined as the overlap between quantum wave function evolved with different Hamiltonians, quantifies the sensitivity of quantum dynamics to perturbations and is often used as a probe of quantum chaos. In this work we consider the behavior of the Loschmidt echo in the many body localized phase, which is characterized by emergent local integrals of motion, and provides a generic example of non-ergodic dynamics. We demonstrate that the fluctuations of the Loschmidt echo decay as a power law in time in the many-body localized phase, in contrast to the exponential decay in few-b…
We study the pinning quantum phase transition in a Tonks-Girardeau gas, both in equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium, using the ground state fidelity and the Loschmidt echo as diagnostic tools. The ground state fidelity (GSF) will have a dramatic decrease when the atomic density approaches the commensurate density of one particle per lattice well. This decrease is a signature of the pinning transition from the Tonks to the Mott insulating phase. We study the applicability of the fidelity for diagnosing the pinning transition in experimentally realistic scenarios. Our results are in excellent agr…
We investigate the particle-number dependence of some features of the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of d-dimensional Fermi gases in the dilute regime. We consider protocols entailing the variation of the external potential which confines the particles within a limited spatial region, in particular sudden changes of the trap size. In order to characterize the dynamic behavior of the Fermi gas, we consider various global quantities such as the ground-state fidelity for different trap sizes, the quantum work statistics associated with the protocol considered, and the Loschmidt echo measuring the ov…
Generalized Loschmidt echo and information scrambling in open systems
Institute for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University（清华大学高等研究院）；Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Genève（日内瓦大学理论物理系）；Department of Physics, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学物理系）
We investigate the Loschmidt echo, the overlap of the initial and final wavefunctions of Luttinger liquids after a spatially inhomogeneous interaction quench. In studying the Luttinger model, we obtain an analytic solution of the bosonic Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations after quenching the interactions within a finite spatial region. As opposed to the power law temporal decay following a potential quench, the interaction quench in the Luttinger model leads to a finite, hardly time dependent overlap, therefore no orthogonality catastrophe occurs. The steady state value of the Loschmidt echo after…
We drive the one-dimensional quantum Ising chain in the transverse field from the paramagnetic phase to the critical point and study its free evolution there. We analyze excitation of such a system at the critical point and dynamics of its transverse magnetization and Loschmidt echo during free evolution. We discuss how the system size and quench-induced scaling relations from the Kibble-Zurek theory of non-equilibrium phase transitions are encoded in quasi-periodic time evolution of the transverse magnetization and Loschmidt echo.
We study the Loschmidt echo for quenches in open one-dimensional lattice models with symmetry protected topological phases. For quenches where dynamical quantum phase transitions do occur we find that cusps in the bulk return rate at critical times tc are associated with sudden changes in the boundary contribution. For our main example, the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model, we show that these sudden changes are related to the periodical appearance of two eigenvalues close to zero in the dynamical Loschmidt matrix. We demonstrate, furthermore, that the structure of the Loschmidt spectrum is linked to…
We study the quench dynamics on cross-stitch flat band networks by a sudden change of the inter-cell hopping strength $J$. For quench processes with $J$ changing as $J=0\rightarrow J\neq0$, we give the analytical expression to the Loschmidt echo which possesses a series of zero points at critical times $t^{*}$, indicating where the dynamical quantum phase transitions occur. We further study the converse quench process with $J\neq0\rightarrow J=0$, and find a non-trivial example that the pre-quench quantum state is not an eigenstate of the post-quench Hamiltonian, whereas the Loschmidt echo $\m…
We formulate dynamical phase transitions in subsystems embedded in larger quantum systems. Introducing the entanglement echo as an overlap of the initial and instantaneous entanglement ground states, we show its analytic structure after a quench provides natural definition of dynamical phase transitions in the subsystem. These transitions come in two varieties, the entanglement-type transitions and the bulk-type Loschmidt transitions. The entanglement-type transitions arise from periodic reorganization of quantum correlations between the subsystem and its environment, manifesting in instantane…
We analytically and numerically study the Loschmidt echo and the dynamical order parameters in a spin chain with a deconfined phase transition between a dimerized state and a ferromagnetic phase. For quenches from a dimerized state to a ferromagnetic phase, we find that the model can exhibit a dynamical quantum phase transition characterized by an associating dimerized order parameters. In particular, when quenching the system from the Majumdar-Ghosh state to the ferromagnetic Ising state, we find an exact mapping into the classical Ising chain for a quench from the paramagnetic phase to the c…
We report dynamical quantum phase transition portrait in the alternating field transverse XY spin chain with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction by investigating singularities in the Loschmidt echo and the corresponding rate function after a sudden quench of system parameters. Unlike the Ising model, the analysis of Loschmidt echo yields non-uniformly spaced transition times in this model. Comparative study between the equilibrium and the dynamical quantum phase transitions in this case reveals that there are quenches where one occurs without the other, and the regimes where they co-exist. Howev…
Phase-Sensitive Measurements on a Fermi-Hubbard Quantum Processor
Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik（马克斯·普朗克量子光学研究所）；Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST)（慕尼黑量子科学与技术中心）；Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München（慕尼黑大学）；Hamburg University of Technology（汉堡工业大学）；University of Strathclyde（斯特拉斯克莱德大学）
We study the response of a highly-excited time dependent quantum many-body state to a sudden local perturbation, a sort of orthogonality catastrophe problem in a transient non-equilibrium environment. To this extent we consider, as key quantity, the overlap between time dependent wave-functions, that we write in terms of a novel two-time correlator generalizing the standard Loschmidt Echo. We discuss its physical meaning, general properties, and its connection with experimentally measurable quantities probed through non-equilibrium Ramsey interferometry schemes. Then we present explicit calcul…
The Loschmidt echo (LE) is a purely quantum-mechanical quantity whose determination for large quantum many-body systems requires an exceptionally precise knowledge of all eigenstates and eigenenergies. One might therefore be tempted to dismiss the applicability of any approximations to the underlying time evolution as hopeless. However, using the fully connected transverse-field Ising model (FC-TFIM) as an example, we show that this indeed is not the case, and that a simple semiclassical approximation to systems well described by mean-field theory (MFT) is in fact in good quantitative agreemen…
We introduce a Ramsey pulse scheme which extracts the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian associated to an arbitrary Lindblad dynamics. We propose a realted protocol to measure via interferometry a generalised Loschmidt echo of a generic state evolving in time with the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian itself, and we apply the scheme to a one-dimensional weakly interacting Bose gas coupled to a stochastic atomic impurity. The Loschmidt echo is mapped into a functional integral from which we calculate the long-time decohering dynamics at arbitrary impurity strengths. For strong dissipation we uncover the phenome…
In this paper, we investigate the dynamical quantum phase transitions appearing in the Loschmidt echo and the time-dependent order parameter of a quantum system of harmonically coupled degenerate bosons as a function of the power-law decay $σ$ of long-range interactions. Following a sudden quench, the nonequilibrium dynamics of this system are governed by a set of nonlinear coupled Ermakov equations. To solve them, we develop an analytical approximation valid at late times. Based on this approximation, we show that the emergence of a dynamical quantum phase transition hinges on the generation …
In this work we revisit collapse and revival oscillations in superfluids suddenly quenched by strong local interactions for the case of a one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model. As the main result we identify the inherent nonequilibrium quantum many-body character of these oscillations by revealing that they are controlled by a sequence of underlying dynamical quantum phase transitions in the real-time evolution after the quench, which manifest as temporal nonanalyticities in return probabilities or Loschmidt echos. Specifically, we find that the time scale of the collapse and revival oscillations…
